Prediction for 2013 – Business

What do people in the EDA and semiconductor industries expect to happen in the industry in 2013? The big 3 EDA players will be reduced to 2, one way or another...

A few weeks ago, I asked many people in the industry for their predictions for 2013. I separately asked for those related to technology in general, to the EDA industry and for business predictions. In the first part I covered technology predictions. Last week I presented those related to EDA and the IP industry, and as can be expected most follow the party line fairly closely. Today I provide the last part that asked about what they expected to happen in business terms. Some of these are really worth reading…

They appear in the order in which they were received.

Mike Santarini - Publisher of Xilinx’s Xcell Journal

We believe that with our hard work over the last four years in creating All Programmable SoCs, FPGAs and 3D ICs as well as the Vivado IP and system-centric design environment that we have a clear advantage over the competition at the 28nm and will maintain a generation ahead advantage moving forward. But of course we expect the competition to follow suit. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery--we expect a lot of flattery over the coming years.

Mike Gianfagna - VP of Corporate Marketing, Atrenta

There are too many EDA companies with a product and no sales force.Some will be acquired and some will fail. Nothing new here, except that it appears there will be more acquisitions in 2013 - a good thing for the entire industry. There will be new companies as well, but these new entrants will be different than they've been in the past.Because venture funding for EDA has all but disappeared, the new norm will be technology proof of concept and then an exit.The exits will be smaller (fueled by bootstrapped and angel-funded enterprises).Wealth will still be created, but on a smaller scale.This trend will require that the acquiring companies must do more of the heavy lifting associated with scaling the product to volume.

The speed of business and the demands placed upon semiconductor companies have reached the point where new levels of collaboration among stakeholders will occur. The cooperatives around technology development will start that trend, but eventually you will see more of these collaborative partnerships arise around applications instead.

Semiconductor and systems companies will work more closely with each other and their preferred vendors to drive innovation and efficiency.

Bill Neifert - Chief Technology Officer, Carbon Design Systems

2013 will see a continuation of a trend that picked up steam in 2012: IP Subsystems. Design IP is growing more and more complex and integrating multiple pieces of this IP into a single SoC brings up a number of challenges. IP suppliers are responding to this by integrating multiple pieces of IP into a single subsystem to get design teams up and running.

One only needs to look as far as ARM’s big.LITTLE solution to see this move in play. Creating product differentiation in a system on chip when more and more of the design is purchased in large chunks will force a new set of design challenges. Architects who had previously focused more on new design creation will spend more cycles optimizing this subsystem IP in combination with internal IP to create an overall system to meet their design criteria.